“The truth is that there has been a boom in handheld media in the world lately. artistic creativity“, comments about Euripides Papadopetrakis, co-founder of the art space and workshop KΕREN. A BURR group exhibition is opening there tomorrow night and is inviting the public to come to see it. art her engraving thanks to the works of well-known, well-known Greek artists with an international presence. He studied painting, engraving, typography and book art at ASCTand, as he tells us, this happened at a time when few students chose engraving as a major.

The realization of this led him and some of his fellow students to take up an art that seemed to be in decline, and at the same time strive for its extraversion. “We want engraving to become more familiar to more people, and its technical difficulties do not serve as a deterrent. Our goal and desire is to use this “traditional” media in quotation marks as unconventionally as possible,” he explains.

And they are not the only ones who strive for this, although there are relatively few exhibitions of prints in Greece, and knowledge of what is happening in the dynamic international prints community is limited. As can be seen from the ever-increasing number of biennials and triennials of printmaking around the world, the organization of master classes and invitations to artists for hospitality (residence), printmaking is rapidly evolving as a visual language through new narratives and a wide range of innovative processes. At the same time, exhibitions are organized to present the public and art theorists with its modern look.

It is a fortunate occasion that during this period a retrospective exhibition of the engraver is presented at the Municipal Art Gallery of Athens. Nikos Desekopoulos organized and curated by OPANDA Christopher Marino with works created from 1974 to the present day. As for the KΟREN workspace, conceptualized and presented by Mr. Papadopetrakis, it is the culmination of a multi-year visual program of the same name, in which the participating artists were introduced to a new expressive language for them in order to create a series of new works, while maintaining their personal visual language.

“We want it to become more familiar to more people, and its technical difficulties do not serve as a deterrent,” says Euripides Papadopetrakis.

OUR Mothering Sunday, a visual artist of the younger generation whose work often uses digital media and collaborations with other art forms, is one of the artists who have worked at the studio. With the works he created, he participates in the BURR exhibition along with Maros Michalakakos, Zafos Xagoraris, Ilias Papailiakis, Dimitris Papaioannou, Irene Ragusini, Stefanos Rocco, Katerina Stephanidakis and Pantelis Chandris.

“I found this openness to more ‘traditional’ art forms very interesting, as well as the fact that I went through an apprenticeship period to familiarize myself with engraving techniques,” she tells us. He created the oxigraphy associated with the Data Garden section and, as he explains to us, the steps required to move from one stage of chemical processes to the next, as well as the care required in etching to swap white with black, they allowed her discover a visual gesture that opens up possibilities for other works.

“I found a lot of my own in engraving,” says artist Ilias Papailekis. “It helped me get closer to the essence of the design that interests me. Understanding how to design a form for printing, the relationship between white and black, empty and filled, pushed my boundaries,” he explains.

“The experience was creative, although at first I hesitated because printmaking is an art that relies heavily on technique,” ​​says the artist and ASKT professor. Pantelis ChandrisWith. After conducting several experiments that did not satisfy him, he turned to finding a way that would not be a continuation of his artistic practice. He came to a technique that is on the fringes of typography, and it gave him the joy of the moment he always looks for in his work: the surprise of discovery when form comes out of form.